June 17, 2016

It was ever thus

Take yourself back in time to 1984, a younger relative who I considered to be an asshole creeping little shit (an early opinion that has had nothing but reinforcement in the intervening 32 years) had managed to convince the parental units that he was a genius at computing, and needed a Sinclair Spectrum to be purchased for him, at the tender age of 15.

When I asked this kid to write a BASIC program to find every prime number between 0 and 100, he looked at me like I was fucking insane, of course, this was because his genius extended only so far as loading games, which he probably convinced them that he was responsible for the computer running…

BASIC was an excellent language, as a wildly dyslexic engineer type who just saw shimmering fields of garbage when looking at “proper” programming languages, BASIC had that “almost English” and “makes sense” instruction set

FOR X=0 to X=100
GOSUB blah blah
GOTO blah blah
NEXT X
END

etc… sure, it wasn’t necessarily elegant or compact or fast or able to exploit all the resources and hardware calls, but in its ability to create something that actually worked, a debug something that didn’t, it was unparalleled.

HTM was the same, back in the day when creating a web page meant opening up a text editor like Notepad, oh the cries of woe and anguish when Netscape Gold 3.0 came out and you could WYSIWYG create an HTM page (HTML wasn’t really out properly back then) and it was true, some buggy things could only be debugged by using Notepad.

I once spent an afternoon with someone who was on the team charged with creating the original VisualBASIC, now evolved into Vb scripts and so on, and they were quite adamant that the original utility of BASIC was what they were aiming at, and it was constantly made even more distant from the original goal by having more and more things patched onto it to provide new and amazing “features”… I dunno, I could never get on with VB.

It wasn’t the end of a era for everyone, just dyslexic assholes like me, I half turned into the asshole relative, it’s easier to let someone else write that shit and just load / run as needed myself.

Besides, I was never the creeping shit that claimed to be doing something that I was not, actually writing that shit, I was the engineer shit who observed that the Gigabyte mobo (BE6 I think from memory) for the Slot 1 intel Pentium would crash winders as soon as you installed Epson inkjet printers and software, I did not know *why* but I could reproduce it across different hardware, and in my own small way had a part in forcing Gigybyte to give me (and others) my money back… I guess they couldn’t fix the bug either.

What can I say, I’m typing this on a PC that I specced and built myself, looking at a NAS box I specced and built myself, and they both just work, I don’t get glitches or crashes or slowdowns or unexplained anything, they are both basically invisible, insofar as when I want to run a program I just do, and it just works.

I must be doing a lot of somethings right.

The biggest one is no asshole ever gets on the network or gets to touch any of the devices on the network.

Back when I was doing IT it was one of my most politically incorrect statements, and one that I was always expecting to get me fired, I’d walk into a place and say “I hear you have an asshole problem” in the same way the exterminator would say “I hear you have a rat problem”

But I *meant* it, 99% of problems are created by people.

In shades of the same thing, many people have been asking me about BREXIT, should be stay or should we go, my response is always the same, in or out isn’t going to make any difference to a lot of things that we really should be changing, as it is, as a country that is currently in, mainly the EU shit that we have enforced locally is the shit we should not have, and the EU shit that we have NOT enforced locally is the shit we should have, and neither of those has anything to do with the EU, and everything to do with those who will remain in the same positions of power and influence whether we are in or out…

People talk about “us” retaining “our” control of “our” borders, nobody every asked me if I wanted any wogs or poles here, and that is the one thing that won’t change, nobody is going to ask me, so who is this “us” and “our” that you speak of, because it sure as fuck ain’t ever going to include me.

By now it is a famous quote, I don’t even need to name the person who said ” we know how to fix it, we don’t know how to get re-elected if we do”

And the point everyone misses, there it is absolute proof that the system is so broken that it rewards continued failure and punishes any sign of success or competence.

Broken by design or broken by default, aye, there is a subject that we can discuss at leisure, if you’re brave enough.

We’ll get back to this in a mo, but first, the dutch.

You know the dutch are fucked up when they have one single word to describe some fucked up shit, we say “guy who blows donkeys” and they have one word, we say “guy who stands on a bucket to fuck cows” and they have one word, but some of their one words are very good for all this, milineuker (sp?) is one of them, literally it means “ant fucker” but practically it means someone who obsesses over the tiniest details.

YOU *NEVER* see a guy who goes out and builds an engine from scratch, eg making a radial engine out of an old vee dub jugs etc, get into ant fucking, it is *ALWAYS* the guys who bought a bunch of over the counter parts and assembled them, and ant fucking is the only way to make your mark.

So, back to broken by design or broken by default.

Ant fucking will break any system, everyone making teeny tiny personalisations and so on, and it is cumulative, like rot.

Secret illuminati lizard overlords are not required, basic DNA will inevitably lead to ant fucking, and ant fucking will do the same job as secret illuminati lizard overlords, but oh so much better, there is no secret cabal to expose, there is no dragon to behead, there is no horde to be decimated, it’s inevitable creeping death by billions of independent replicating nano machines, compared to the scale of the whole.

Despotic leaders like Kim in NK, know this, fuck, they guy was educated in the west, he is NOT stupid, he *knows* his hand coded BASIC routines are cack, but he also knows if he lets anyone else start ant fucking, the whole system is doomed.

I’m not claiming that the NK culture is anything to revere and preserve, but really, what do we have to supplant it with?

And as for the current ongoing gun crisis in the good old yew ess of aay, the Norks have a very large standing army, all of whom have assault rifles, so guns themselves do not make you “free”

We are regularly told how you are not free in NK, all the things you cannot do or say or think, yet here in the free and liberated west we are told that the Orlando shooter killed 49 and injured another 53, and depending on who you listened to, shot some people up to 12 times, and expended just about 1,000 rounds of ammo, and according to other people, fired only 212 rounds including those used for the police shootout at the end.

So if he fired 212 including the police shootout, killed or injured 102, he was doing pretty fucking good, special ops good, especially as this will involve one handed magazine changes while holding everyone off with the pistol in his other hand.

If he fired off 1000 rounds, he was carry 40 lbs of ammo around himself, assuming 45 round extended mags, at least 20 of the bastards, and that is getting comical when it comes to getting out the next mag, ejecting the old one, inserting the new.

But even so, if the stated claim is to kill the fucking perverts and fags, given there were 320 people in the club, 15% dead and 15% injured is a piss poor effort.

I myself as a lone wolf could guarantee a 100% fatality rate, I just need one rental vehicle to block each entrance, something you could do remarkably easily, then dump 50 gallons of gasoline into the club, throw in a zippo, and sit back with a beer and a cigar waiting for the news crews to arrive so you can state your manifesto, or waiting for swat to pop a cap in your ass, either way it is much more efficient.

All the pro NRA types could have armed concealed carry citizens in the club able and ready to defend themselves, it would save me wasting a perfectly good zippo to ignite the gas

You get the point here, it is trivially obvious to anyone who gives it a moment’s thought, and any student of history will agree, pub bombings and sarin gas attacks in subways, a gun is one of the least effective ways of committing mass slaughter.

So why do these “shooters” who always die at the scene from Lee Harvey onward, so they can’t testify, always go out and get long guns and kill a lot of people, but only a small fraction of the number they could have killed if they were serious?

How much is an assault rife and a handgun and a 1,000 rounds of ammo? I’m not asking an empirical question, I mean in comparison to 1,000 lbs of fertiliser and diesel?

There is a guy down under who uses 10 lbs of anfo to blow big tree stumps, ends up with holes where the stumps were big enough you jump down into them and can’t see the ground any more.

Doesn’t make sense, unless all these shooters are ant fucked by a committee into re-enacting a Rambo, that would make sense… a terrorist op planned by committee…